Focused Direction – Know Where You are Going
You need to know your desired outcome to reach the finish line. If you wander aimlessly doing the day-to-day tasks of management and administration, it’s easy to get bogged down in the mire of formats and schedules instead of staying laser-focused on the outcomes you are accountable to meet.
Someone has to be that fog light, maybe the engineer sitting at wheel and looking ahead, identifying the obstacles, and preparing your team to handle the distractions waiting to deter you from your destination.
Why You Do What You Do?
Today’s lesson is simple and straightforward. Let’s do this exercise, and you can examine your fall schedule to see if, in fact, you will arrive where you hope to be in March 2023.
Begin by identifying the tasks you spend time on every day. Chunk them together if you like. It could be something like:
- Meetings – administrative meetings, human resource meetings, financial meetings. Separate them into whatever categories work for you, but don’t generalize meetings. Some meetings are critical for the destination, some meetings are needless routine banter.
- Administrative computer details – think about how much time you spend sitting in from of your computer. Are you writing reports, reading memos, or responding to emails – what are you really doing? Be ruthless, examine the outcome of the hours spent. Are your hours contributing significantly to your final destination?
- Human resource – time you spend with staff in groups and one-on-one. Is this an important aspect of your success? Think specifically about the outcomes. What needs changing?
- Learning – Are you taking time to explore better ways to get to the destination? Where can you learn more? Could you improve your ability to engineer successful outcomes?
Where are you headed?
Hopefully, by now, you get the picture. If you don’t have a clear destination, how can you use the measurements in 1-4? You have to be clear about what you need to accomplish. Can you state in a sentence what success will look like for your team this fall quarter? Is it crystal clear? If not, you won’t get there. Spend the majority of your time working toward that outcome. Steer the ship, engineer the train, and guide the team to success.
We are constantly diverted by troubles, problems, challenges, scarcity, and shiny objects. These constant distractions are draining and even debilitating. We called the SONAR LEADERSHIP by that name to imply following the path to the destination. If underwater crews don’t have a readout of where they are going, before long, they can be in dangerous waters that are unfriendly to foreign visitors.
Invest Time
Instead of allowing the daily routines to lull you into a sense of busy accomplishment, I urge you to take stock. Take the time to scrutinize your behavior patterns, choices, and priorities and
Ask Yourself:
- What must be done to get where we want to go?
- What activities support that direction?
- What attitudes support that direction?
- What do we need to learn to reach our destination?
- How will we identify if we have veered off track?
- What will I do as soon as I recognize we have detoured?
- How will I clearly communicate this information to my team?
Clear Lenses
I liken the above exercises to taking the cloth, and finally, after struggling to see through my reading glasses for hours or even days, I stop and carefully clean the lens. It’s remarkable how my view changes and how much easier it is to see what I need to see.
